Past perfect tense problems

What you are describing is the pluperfect tense. The perfect is "have verbed." In English "pluperfect" is often known as "past perfect," but "pluperfect" is more precise.

Your first example is wrong. It grinds against my internal ear. Yet the mistake is terribly common.

A whole lot of published writers have absolutely no tense control. They churn out disastrous sentences like, "She had wanted him when she first heard his voice; when she had begun to understand him." They don't even make their mistakes consistently, grating between correct and error and correct again.

I contract the "had," a lot of the time. (Especially in "He had had little opportunity ..." and similar.)

Dahabnz, I think you're misunderstanding the use of this tense. Your first example is wrong because you were mixing tenses. When two actions happened "before" you need to keep the tense consistent:

"He had already risen and she had made coffee."

To me, this tense is relative -- it's to be set against the past tense to establish a chronological order of events. After that, if there's no relation, you can safely drop the past perfect.

The idea of minimizing the past perfect is not to eliminate every single one arbitrarily. The idea is to establish the fact that a series of action, for example, happened before the current time. Then later you may drop the past perfect and still clearly illustrate that these actions are in the past:


"Joe remembered the day before. He had gone to the bank and taken out the cash. The manager was very nice to him, and offered him a cup of coffee while he waited. He signed his name and put the money in his pocket. And now he didn't know what he had done with the money."

The first sentence established the current time -- he "remembered." So the second sentence is relative -- it happened the day BEFORE. So we use past perfect. But once that is established, we can safely use past again because now we are in the "day before" time frame. That is, until the last sentence -- we are now back to the "now" so it's relative again. Otherwise, it's extremely cluncky:


"Joe remembered the day before. He had gone to the bank and taken out the cash. The manager had been very nice to him, and had offered him a cup of coffee while he had waited. He had signed his name and put the money in his pocket. And now he didn't know what he had done with the money."

Yikes.

Tense

I like your first sentence. Sometimes grammar really can get in the way of writing well.

Jamesaritchie said:

Sometimes grammar really can get in the way of writing well.

Click to expand...

Funny how often we forget the obvious.

Is there a website to visit to help with tense issues? One that has examples with wrong and the correct sentences would be nice.

The second line is grammatically better, but sounds wordy. Fix it by using a contraction: It had changed little in the years since he'd last seen it.

Or better: It had changed little over the years.

Julie nailed it.